A decade ago, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest launched one of the most ambitious programs of international mission work in the history of American evangelical Christianity.

With what he called the PEACE Plan, Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren set his church the goal of helping to eliminate world poverty, disease and illiteracy by harnessing the power of Christians in the U.S. and abroad.

The effort, which took teams of Saddleback volunteers to every corner of the globe, was lauded as a visionary new step for American evangelicals, known at the time mostly for conservative social views and alliance with Republican politics. In 2005, Time Magazine named Warren one of its 100 most influential people in the world.

A decade later, things are far less straightforward.

Despite achieving numerous successes, especially in the African nation of Rwanda, Saddleback’s PEACE Plan, and American evangelicals in general, suddenly find themselves working in a different and more complicated world.

As the center of gravity in global Christianity shifts from a secularizing West to developing nations with rapidly growing Christian populations, churches in America are discovering that old cultural assumptions and patterns of mission work no longer serve.

Last week, more than 700 Asian American evangelical Christians and their supporters signed an open letter demanding greater racial sensitivity in the wider evangelical church.

The letter was in part a reaction to recent events at Saddleback, where a series of comments Warren made on his Facebook page and a video shown at a Christian Leadership Conference were deemed racially offensive by Asian American viewers.

At the same time, the recent opening of a new Saddleback campus in Hong Kong, part of a PEACE Plan initiative to establish Saddleback branches in 12 cities around the world, was met with wariness by Chinese Christians, who questioned Saddleback’s motives and objected to what they called censorship of critical comments from Asians on Warren’s Facebook page.

“There’s a sensitivity to colonialization,” said Tim Tseng, a Baptist pastor in San Jose who has taught at American evangelical seminaries and ministered in Chinese-American churches. “It’s more a sense of, ‘Why (is) this person who doesn’t get us trying to use us as another site for his empire building?’”

A Saddleback spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Last week, in response to the Register’s story about the open letter from Asian American Christians, a Saddleback spokesman emailed a statement saying: “Saddleback is a multi-ethnic congregation with members speaking more than 70 languages. We have always aimed to be what we have called an ‘ALL-nation’ congregation…

“Many leaders at Saddleback Church might have chosen to sign (the open letter from Asian-Americans) had we had the opportunity to do so… Our Asian American brothers and sisters have given the global church a much needed reminder that we have more work to do. We commend them, and join them.”

The fact that even Saddleback, with its impressive legacy of reaching out to diverse populations around the globe, has begun meeting resistance from non-white Christians suggests the depth and rapidity of change in the Christian world.

Saddleback, which meets at eight locations throughout ethnically diverse Southern California, offers services and classes in Spanish, performs outreach work in low-income communities and encourages members to get involved in the international PEACE Plan.

In recent years, Warren has drawn flak from more conservative Christians for his efforts to reach out to Muslims and for Saddleback’s pioneering work with AIDS victims.

And yet, when Warren last month posted a joking image of a member of China’s paramilitary Red Guard on his Facebook page, then dismissed critics as failing to understand his sense of humor, Asian American Christians reacted swiftly.

Warren later apologized and removed the image from his Facebook page.

The vehemence of Asian-Americans’ reaction was only partly directed at Saddleback, said Kathy Khang, director of multiethnic ministries at Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, a college ministry organization.

“Asians are growing as a presence in the (broader evangelical) church but not in the leadership in the church,” said Khang. “There’s that total disconnect… The dominant culture of the white evangelical church has never had to question whether they see their identity in Christ through the lens of race and ethnicity.”

The timing of the controversy over Warren’s Facebook comments coincided awkwardly with the Oct. 6 launch of Saddleback’s Hong Kong campus.

More than 800 attended the church’s first service, which took place inside an auditorium at a local Christian college. The following week, the congregation was half that size, according to attendance numbers posted on the church’s Facebook page.

Many comments on the Facebook page were enthusiastic. Others were skeptical.

“Is being a celebrity the same thing as being a good shepherd?” commented William Yeung, a pastor at a Hong Kong Presbyterian Church, in apparent reference to Warren’s worldwide media fame. Warren and his wife, Kay, were recently on the cover of People magazine discussing the aftermath of their son Matthew’s suicide in April.

Sam Tsang, a professor at a Hong Kong Baptist seminary, said “the word ‘colonial’ came up repeatedly in the discussion” among local Christians about Saddleback’s arrival.

Local Christians asked, “How does a western guy of California relate to the busy, bustling Hong Kong?” Tsang said.

Skepticism was heightened when many Hong Kong Christians protested that their comments about Warren’s Facebook statements were being systematically deleted on Warren’s Facebook page, said Justin Tse, an Asian-American Christian currently traveling in Hong Kong.

The deletions provoked “cries of 'censorship' and even some comparisons of Saddleback to the People's Republic of China’s practices of censorship,” Tse wrote in an email to the Register.

Chloe Starr, a professor who studies Asian Christianity at Yale University, said many Americans continue to assume mistakenly that communist China is an overwhelmingly anti-Christian nation in need of western missionary work.

In fact, Starr said, there are an estimated 70 million Christians in mainland China, with close to another one million in Hong Kong.

Most Chinese Christians have ready access to Bibles, Starr said. And even so-called underground churches, which do not have official government permission to gather, are allowed to meet and even establish seminaries. Only overt public proselytizing is forbidden, though Starr said many churches find ways around the prohibition.

As a result, many Chinese Christians no longer feel the need for help from western missionaries. Some Chinese churches have even sent their own missionaries to cities in the west where Christianity is declining as a cultural force.

In Hong Kong, Christians’ main worry is not evangelization but resisting encroachment by the mainland Chinese government, Starr said.

In an April interview with Christianity Today magazine, Warren said his goal was never for Saddleback to play a dominant role in the cities where it expands.

“We're not going to these cities to replace the churches that are there,” Warren said. “We're going to resource the churches that are there. Let's build a base in different places around the world, so that we can help resource and train the churches of that area without them having to come to America…

“No local church, including Saddleback, is meant to last forever. New churches need to be born.”

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